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To: 2MAR$ who wrote (33845)	3/4/2013 10:05:50 AM
From: Solon	1 Recommendation Respond to of 69300

I agree. That is a meaningful photo! Funny how the misguided and the petty, small, and mean sometimes stumble accidentally on the human experience!!

To: 2MAR$ who wrote (33845)	3/4/2013 10:15:22 AM
From: Solon	1 Recommendation Respond to of 69300

guardian.co.uk This is really good news. How different than the praying and begging and the killing and burning (sacrificing) of living beings--as pre-scientific people felt compelled in their ignorance to do. Now scientists research and test reality. Eventually, they will find the solution... HIV 'cure': is it the breakthrough it seems? Mississippi baby now effectively free of the virus will cause excitement, but is likely to mean little for those already infected The HIV virus, inactive traces of which remain in the Mississippi baby in what scientists call a 'functional cure'. Photograph: Geostock/Getty Images Scientists on a quest to cure HIV will be enormously encouraged, as well as intrigued, by the reports from Mississippi in the US of a two-year-old child who had the virus at birth but who is now apparently free of it. It sounds like one of those serendipitous breakthroughs that have characterised the fight against HIV and Aids, such as the discovery that some African sex workers are resistant to the virus and the realisation that people taking antiretroviral drugs, which suppress the levels of HIV in the body, are unlikely to infect their partners. But is this the big one? Have doctors stumbled across the cure for HIV? Unfortunately not. This is progress and will open up new avenues for scientists to explore, but the implications for those already infected or even the still significant numbers of babies born with the virus in the developing world are sadly probably slight. The Mississippi baby became infected because the mother had not been tested in early pregnancy. If she had, the woman would have been put on antiretroviral drugs, the baby would have been delivered by caesarean section and then given a short course of drugs – all of which would almost certainly have prevented transmission of HIV from mother to child. When doctors realised the mother had HIV, it was too late for the standard prevention package, so they implemented plan B, which was to put the baby on the full three-drug cocktail straight away. It is already known that the sooner after infection an adult goes on the drugs, the better the outcome. But here, it seems, the drugs hit the virus so hard and so early that it all but disappeared. This is what scientists call a "functional cure". Traces of the virus remain, but they are inactive even though the mother disappeared from follow-up and the baby was off drugs for five months. This was the serendipitous event – other babies will have been treated the same way but remain on the drugs, so it is impossible to know whether they are HIV-free or their HIV is just drug-suppressed. And the scientists are anxious they should not stop the drugs now as a result of this case. One HIV-free baby may be exceptional. There could be some reason, as yet unknown, why this baby is different from others. Hopefully, scientists will establish that any newborn baby can be functionally cured in this way. But they do not expect the same to be true of children whose HIV infection is discovered later – let alone adults. They think this has to do with hitting the virus at the earliest possible moment after birth, before it has reached the CD4 cells in the immune system which harbour a reservoir of HIV in adults that the drugs are never quite able to wipe out. The Mississippi baby was unusual, because the vast majority of pregnant women in wealthy countries are tested for HIV and most infections in babies are prevented – in the UK as many as 98%. That is not so in poorer countries. In the developing world, there is still a big and tragic problem. In 2008, the latest year for which there are figures, 430,000 babies were infected at birth. That is a drop in the numbers, but far too high and desperately sad for parents and child. It might seem as though the Mississippi baby breakthrough will, therefore, save thousands of lives in the 25 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, where most of these infections are taking place. But there is already a way of preventing these infections using drugs – which is far better than a functional cure using similar drugs. The problem is not how to do it – it is to ensure the drugs and the medical staff are in the right place at the right time to treat mother or baby or both. There are plenty of pregnant women in Africa known to have HIV who cannot get the treatment they want and need to protect their child. It is not very likely that the clinics they attend will instead have the three-drug combinations that the Mississippi baby received from skilled nursing staff within hours of birth. Real excitement is justified by the Mississippi discovery – but it is what it tells scientists still trying to figure out how to defeat HIV that matters. Any practical applications are a long way further down the line."

To: 2MAR$ who wrote (33845)	3/4/2013 11:17:03 AM
From: longnshort	1 Recommendation Respond to of 69300

OBAMA GOON ADMINISTRATION BULLIES YOUNG FEMALE REPORTER, "CALLING HER THE VILEST NAMES — BITCH, C--T, A--HOLE.” I know that this does not need repeating, but if this were a Republican administration, the media would be burning the Commander-in-Chief at the stake. Instead, these tools continue to polish his knob in an advanced case of Stockholm Syndrome. They sacrifice their integrity, their objectivity, and their principles for an enemy administration whose collectivist goals theyshare. Any decent American journalist would have run the emails referred to in this article on the front page. But instead, they cover for the Stalinist tactics of the thug in the White House. Where are those goosestepping feminazis? Beat The Press NY Post, March 3, 212As coverage of last week’s flare-up between Bob Woodward and the White House devolved into the granular parsing of words and implications and extrapolations and possible intent, the larger point was roundly missed: the increasing pressure that White House correspondents feel when dealing with the Obama administration — to follow their narrative, to be properly deferential (!), to react to push-back by politely sitting down and shutting up. “The whole Woodward thing doesn’t surprise me at all,” says David Brody, chief political correspondent for CBN News. “I can tell you categorically that there’s always been, right from the get-go of this administration, an overzealous sensitivity to any push-back from any media outlet.” A brief recap: After the Washington Post ran a Woodward op-ed in which he claimed that the administration was “moving the goalposts” on the eve of the potential sequester, the veteran journalist went on to assert that economic adviser Gene Sperling said, in an e-mail, “I think you will regret staking out this claim.” While Woodward spent a lot of the week on cable news going back and forth on whether that was a threat, few reporters, if any, asked why a high-level administration official spent so much time — Sperling admittedly shouted at Woodward during a 30-minute phone call, followed by that e-mail — attempting to control an opinionexpressed in a newspaper. The answer, say former and current White House correspondents, is simple: This administration is more skilled and disciplined than any other in controlling the narrative, using social media to circumnavigate the press. On the flip side, our YouTube culture means even the slightest gaffe can be devastating, and so you have an army of aides and staffers helicoptering over reporters. Finally, this week, reporters are pushing back. Even Jonathan Alter — who frequently appears on the Obama-friendly MSNBC — came forward to say he, too, had been treated horribly by the administration for writing something they didn’t like. “There is a kind of threatening tone that, from time to time — not all the time — comes out of these guys,” Alter said this week. During the 2008 campaign swing through Berlin, Alter said that future White House presssecretary Robert Gibbs disinvited him from a dinner between Obama and the press corps over it. “I was told ‘Don’t come,’ in a fairly abusive e-mail,” he said. “[It] made what Gene Sperling wrote [to Woodward] look like patty-cake.” “I had a young reporter asking tough, important questions of an Obama Cabinet secretary,” says one DC veteran. “She was doing her job, and they were trying to bully her. In an e-mail, they called her the vilest names — bitch, c--t, a--hole.” He complained and was told the matter would be investigated: “They were hemming and hawing, saying, ‘We’ll look into it.’ Nothing happened.”